For a man with a low profile, Superintendent of Motor Vehicles Steve Martin wields a big stick

Steve Martin, B.C. Superintendent of Motor Vehicles.

Photograph by: Josh Thompson
, Vancouver Sun

VICTORIA — It’s hardly a flashy post, but from his office perched above the public library in downtown Victoria, Steve Martin wields a remarkable amount of power.

No, not the Father of the Bride, Roxanne, “wild and crazy guy” celebrity actor, Steve Martin.

This Martin is B.C.’s Superintendent of Motor Vehicles, the man who can pull your licence with the stroke of a pen, and who signs the bottom of just about any bad-news letter you’ll get when it comes to driving in the province.

The father of two, Martin carries an extremely low public profile, making his way anonymously through the world in a stiffly creased suit and a perfectly knotted tie.

But don’t mistake his desire to remain outside the spotlight for inaction. By almost all accounts, Martin is the driving force behind the provincial government’s headline-grabbing crackdowns on drinking and driving and distracted driving.

Those changes have meant much stiffer penalties for people caught with a blood-alcohol level at or above .05, and have seen cellphones banned from vehicles unless they are used in conjunction with a hands-free device.

In November, the provincial government estimated the new drinking and driving rules had saved 104 lives during the two years since they were implemented.

“Everything that has taken place (recently) to increase safety on our roads here in British Columbia, you’ve got to point to Steve Martin in being instrumental in bringing that together,” said Kash Heed, former solicitor general who resigned as minister in May 2010, just as some of those key pieces of legislation were starting to take shape.

“The highest praise I can give to him is that Steve Martin has saved lives here in British Columbia,” added Heed.

“It’s as simple as that.”

***

A career bureaucrat, Martin is an intensely private person, refusing to publicly disclose personal details as seemingly benign as his age.

“A gentleman never asks a gentleman that question,” he said coyly when asked his age in a recent interview.

The reluctance was curious, but unyielding.

“I like to keep people guessing,” he said when pressed, an uncomfortable grin growing on his face as he waited for the age question to pass.

Martin didn’t explain his reasons for silence, though later in the interview he did touch on one of the possible reasons he may prefer to remain unknown.

“I get threats; even members of my staff get threats,” he disclosed.

“I get some pretty interesting Christmas cards, and they don’t say Merry Christmas,” he added.

When asked why, the answer was simple: “People don’t like being prohibited from driving.”

Martin will let some details of his biography slip — for example that he grew up in Cobble Hill, north of Victoria, before doing a BA at the University of Victoria and then a Masters of Public Administration at Queen’s University.

He will even make jokes at his own expense: “Members of my family will say I’m not very pop-culture-savvy,” he said in an interview, recounting the moment in university when he first learned there was another Steve Martin in the world.

“I was on the cross-country team and I was in the athletic room getting therapy and the athletic trainers started to do all these weird things, ‘You must be a wild and crazy guy’,” he said.

“I had no idea what he was talking about,” said Martin, who thought maybe the trainer was at his class’s last party at the student union building.

“Somebody finally clued me in.”

But for the most part, Martin’s private life is just that — private.

That in mind, it’s interesting to learn how driven Martin is by the very personal stories he encounters on the job.

Above his desk — just below the pictures of his own two children — is a coffee mug bearing the image of Alexa Middelaer, the four-year-old who was killed in 2008 by an impaired driver while feeding a horse by the side of a Ladner road.

Martin said Alexa’s mother, Laurel, gave him the mug while they met, one of the many times he’s got together with the family of a traffic-related victim.

“It’s not always the easiest thing I do, but I have the opportunity to meet victims and victim’s families and connect with them and hear their stories because they are an important part of the overall equation,” he said.

“The stories are very, very painful and compelling. It puts a real-life face on motor vehicle fatalities.”

Martin added that on occasion he also goes out with police, where at times he has seen first-hand how things have gone right.

One story he remembers well came not long after the government amended the drinking-and-driving law so it would adhere to changes mandated by the courts.

Well after midnight, the officer Martin was riding with called him to a car to meet with a driver who had just been stopped.

As Martin walked to the car he was greeted by a younger guy, covered in tattoos.

The driver had just come from a bar, Martin said, but was sober.

“I was going down a destructive path,” Martin recalled the driver telling him that night.

Martin said the driver told him he’d taken the mandated responsible driver program after being caught drinking and driving, and that he had also been forced to install an ignition interlock in his car that would only allow him to drive while sober.

“He said, ‘My marriage was on the rocks, I’d lost my job and what these programs did is they helped me change my behaviour’,” said Martin, recalling his conversation that night.

“ ‘My relationship is solid, I have a job again’ — and really that’s what we’re about,” added Martin.

“That was somebody who had just got an IRP (immediate roadside prohibition) in the last year and that had turned his life around,” he said.

“How great is that?”

***

Andrew Murie, CEO for Mothers Against Drunk Driving Canada, works with officials across the country who do Martin’s job, and says Martin stands out as among the best.

“These people are usually lap sitters for their minister. Steve will buck that,” Murie said in an interview.

“If he really believes something is the right thing to do — he’s very passionate on people that are affected by these road crashes, especially the alcohol-related — he’ll really go to town,” he added.

Murie called Martin the “quarterback” of the effort to tackle drinking and driving in B.C., adding his organization officially recognized Martin in 2011 with a citizen of distinction award.

“A lot of times I go to war with the equivalent of Steve, because MADD wants changes and they’re doing the bureaucratic thing and not being very progressive,” said Murie.

“He put the whole program together.”

Despite the praise, Martin is loath to take much credit for the changes that have taken place under his watch, preferring instead to view what he has done as a pragmatic reaction to the status quo.

“In 2008, I was fairly new to my job and I was quite dismayed to know that we were quite a bit higher than the national average in terms of fatalities per hundred thousand population,” he said in an interview.

“I think the exciting opportunity here is this is almost entirely preventable. I always kind of bristle when I hear the term accident, because really they aren’t accidents, they’re crashes. Even if it’s weather-related, quite often it’s driving too fast for conditions,” he said.

“It’s one of the easiest risk areas in the public safety sphere that you can make positive change.”

Martin explained that for drinking and driving, he went toward the roadside suspension model — where impaired drivers face immediate penalties ranging from $600 to more than $4,000, as well loss of a driver’s licence and vehicle — because it draws a direct connection between the crime and the punishment.

“The fact that these are immediate, they happen at the roadside, people lose their vehicles.”

Martin says his next challenge will be finding a way to change the system so it can deal as effectively with high-risk drivers as it has impaired ones.

He said the system now looks at the number of points drivers have amassed over a two-year period — or window of review — to determine how much of a risk you pose on the road.

The challenge with that is you can amass significant quantities of driving infractions over a 20-year period, but you can sort of pass through these windows,” he said.

“For example, you could be in a correctional institution for two years and guess what, you come out with a pretty good driving record,” he added, saying Justice Minister Shirley Bond has asked him to review the system and determine a better method.

“We’ve got to evolve our approaches and we’ve got to look at the success we’ve had on impaired driving with the education and counselling,” he said.

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